Maryland-Syracuse Postgame Quotes

Maryland Athletics

2-24-2014

Maryland Head Coach Mark Turgeon

Opening Statement:

“First of all I’d like to thank our crowd. They stuck with it. I thought they were tremendous down the stretch and gave us a chance to win the game because the energy in the building was great. We just weren’t very good against the zone to be honest with you. I’ll take the blame. I don’t know why, I felt great about our game plan. I’ve seen it work against them, but we just turned it over too much. 18 turnovers led to 26 points. With that said, our defense in the second half was much better. We played much smarter. We realized who the scorers were. [Trevor] Cooney missed some shots for us, but we were smarter defensively and rebounded pretty well in the second half. We were right there. I thought Nick [Faust] got fouled, and the replay showed that, but it’s been that type of year for us. They didn’t call it and they won the game.”

On if they can take anything away from this game:

“The disappointing thing tonight is that Syracuse was ripe to be beaten. They just had an emotional game Saturday and [Jerami] Grant got hurt. It was right there for us and we just couldn’t get it going. I think we are better than them in this building if we play the way we are capable and don’t turn it over the way we did. They won the game. Give them credit.”

On turnovers:

“You’ve got to give [Syracuse] credit. Their length and their zone is unique. We just didn’t attack the way we needed to attack it. We waited until we were down. The way we attacked it later in the game is the way we should have attacked it [the whole game]. Just carless turnovers and we missed some shots against it early. Give them some credit too. They anticipate well.”

On the final play:

“There’s a reason he’s {Jim Boeheim} won 900 games. They took the initial play away and I wish we had gotten the ball a little further forward for Seth [Allen]. That was our third option, but it was the safe option. Give them credit. They kind of double-teamed it. I wish he would have gone straight up instead, but Seth made a lot of shots for us tonight.”

On Tyler Ennis:

“He was really good. He had 20 points on 18 shots so I think we did a pretty good job on him. He had to do more offensively. Once we put Nick [Faust] over to him that really helped us. He shot over Seth most of the game.”

Junior guard Dez Wells

On Nick Faust’s drive at the end of the game:

“I trust Nick (Faust) in those situations. I don’t wish that he would have done anything differently. Those things happen, it could have gone either way.”

On the team’s turnovers today:

“We just made bad passes. I mean you guys saw the game. We’ve got to do better, watch film tomorrow morning, work out, and build off of this. It’s not the end of the world. Our season is not over until the ACC tournament is over. We still have a chance, I’m ready, my teammates are ready and were going to go on a run.”

On the team’s mindset for the rest of the season:

“We have bad plays, we have good plays, it’s all part of the game. They’re a good team, we’re a good team, we could have won this game just like we could have won against Duke and Virginia and all the good teams we have been playing really close. Something has to happen and that’s something me and Coach Turgeon are going to talk about and I’m just going to put it on my shoulders to figure out what we need to do and what needs to happen for us to take that jump.”

Sophomore guard Seth Allen

Thoughts on the game:

“It’s hard to keep poise. Give credit to Syracuse, their defense is really good. That zone really creates a lot of turnovers because they’re so long. I thought we played hard. We could have taken care of the ball better. Defensively, we played pretty good. They made some tough shots. We did what coach said, every shot was contested.”

On the turnovers:

“You want to be poised, but the crowd gets you going. They’re very long, we have never played a zone like that. Syracuse is famous for their 2-3 zone. We had a good gameplan - it was a couple nitpicky plays.”

On what started the comeback

“We just got stops. The crowd got us into it, they kept us going. And we made shots. That was big for us, we made a lot of big shots late and we made a lot of free throws.”

On the last shot attempt

“I only had three seconds, so I tried the get the best shot I could. They’re very long, so when I was driving I had to run through a lot of them because they were so tall. I tried to put up a shot with the fewest amount of time left and it just didn’t fall.”

Syracuse Head Coach Jim Boeheim

Opening Statement:

“C.J. [Fair] got us off to a good start offensively. Jerami [Grant] tweaked his back halfway through. It was just too sore. He couldn’t go. I thought Mike [Gbinije] did a good job defensively and I thought our defense was good. Tyler [Ennis], we asked to obviously be more offensive-minded. I thought that was the key, really. This was the first game in a while that we got good shots for Trevor [Cooney]. It just wasn’t there for him. When you’re in a close game on the road and a team makes a three and you make one or two mistakes - we don’t make a lot of mistakes. We made one really bad pass on the press and they got points out of it. C.J. made a big three at the end and Trevor made a big shot, but we made some crucial mistakes at the end of the game that allowed Maryland to have the chance. That’s disappointing at this stage of the year. At the end of the day, C.J. made the big shot and then Trevor and that was just enough to hang on and win the game.”

On defense:

“We didn’t get up on [Seth] Allen, especially at the end we wanted to be up on Allen and they hit that last three. We did not do a good job with him. Defensively, overall, we did a pretty good job. There’s no question Rak [Rakeem Christmas] getting in foul trouble, C.J. [Fair] getting in foul trouble and then losing Jerami [Grant] was a lot to overcome and Tyler Ennis was able to enough to overcome that. Trevor’s [Cooney] made those shots all year long. The only games he hasn’t been able to make three’s is when we haven’t been able to get him three’s. You lose two games and you lose a little bit of a confidence factor. It’s our fourth game in eight days, I think, and obviously we’ve had some pretty tough games in there. It’s always difficult when you play Saturday/Monday. It’s more difficult than normal for us with Jerami getting hurt. We had to overcome that. I thought our defense was really good. We don’t make a lot of turnovers and we made a couple bad ones at the end there that allowed them to have an opportunity to win.”

On fouls:

“We put them on the foul line a lot. We’ve been shooting more free throws consistently all year and they got to the line 27 times. We got there six. That’s a lot to overcome.”

On close games:

“How many have we played in the league? 15. All 15. We had one that wasn’t close. We were down against Miami both times. We were behind against Pittsburgh late. This was the game we were most ahead of all the games except two. We were most ahead in this game. This has been the way we’ve played since the league started. We’ve been down seven or eight times in the last 8-10 minutes. We were actually ahead tonight, which we weren’t used to and made a couple mistakes.”

Senior forward C.J. Fair

On the closing stretch:

“We knew the pressure was on [Maryland] because we had the lead. We never felt that we were going to lose because they still had to score. They did a good job attacking at the end, getting to the foul line and cutting the lead down. We were able to withstand that.”

On how big it was to get this win:

“This was definitely a big win. It might have been the biggest win of the season. To break your losing streak you always have to work your hardest because you’re so anxious and you want the game so bad. Sometimes it goes bad for you, but I think we played well today.”

On sitting in the first half with foul trouble:

“It was tough for me to watch. I’ve never been out that long all season. I was out for like four minutes. My teammates stepped up big.”

Freshman guard Tyler Ennis

On the win:

“It was a really big win for us. We played without Jerami [Grant] in the second half, which kind of hurt us. I thought everyone that came in really stepped up and fought for the full 40 minutes."

On the shot before the half he made:

“I just tried to get a good look. They were hedging out and I had [Shaquille] Cleare on me and I just pulled up and it went in.”

On building the lead in the first half:

“We were just making shots. The past two games, we weren’t shooting a good percentage and we were missing shots we usually make. Today, we got it clicking in the first half and we played good defense.”